


Going to the Chapel (a story in the 21 Day Plan Universe)

by rosecampion



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M, Relationship(s), Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-03-08
Updated: 2003-03-08
Packaged: 2018-11-20 19:07:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11341509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecampion/pseuds/rosecampion
Summary: A wedding invitation. A trip home. And relatives. Lots of relatives.





	Going to the Chapel (a story in the 21 Day Plan Universe)

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

Going to the Chapel (a story in the 21 Day Plan Universe)

### Going to the Chapel (a story in the 21 Day Plan Universe)

#### by Rose Campion

  


Going to the Chapel (a story in the Twenty-One Day Plan Universe) 

This story was written as a prezzie for my main beta, JoB. Thanks, Jo, for always going above and beyond the call of duty. It's what she specifically requested: M/D schmoop in the 21 day plan universe. warnings: schmoop. pure schmoop and nothing but schmoop. With a little bit of superfluous sex to liven things up. Not beta'ed because it was a surprise to my main beta reader. standard disclaimer: I don't own 'em but they have a much better time hanging out with me, seeing as how I'm willing to give them a happy ending. rating: NC-17, for cute boys doing naughty things to each other. archive: Jo says that there isn't enough M/D out there, so that it should go everywhere. You want it, grab it. Note: though this is a story in the 21 day plan universe, it is set much earlier in time than the original 21 day plan story. 

Due to luck and leaving a bit earlier than normal, I made it home that Friday a good bit earlier than I normally did. Mulder, I mean Fox. It's still hard for me to get used to not thinking of him as Mulder even though we've been lovers for a handful of years now. Fox would have said that it was due to the random, chaotic forces that control the universe, that some butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil and so traffic throughout metro DC was light, or some crap like that. It's hard sometimes not to laugh. Fox's weird idesed to piss me off, but these days, they amuse me more than anything. 

I walked in the door about four, just as Fox was getting ready to leave. He paused in pulling on his jean jacket to give me a brief kiss. "I'm heading out to pick up the boys. Scully'll kill me if I'm late again." 

Damn but wasn't he sexy, his jacket half shrugged on, his jeans the tight pair that were worn until they were nearly white in spots and they were velvety soft. His hair was tousled, still mostly brown, but starting to pick up spots of gray near his temples. 

"You want me to go with you?" I asked. 

"Nah," Fox shook his head and finished pulling on his jacket and started buttoning it. For all that it was April already, it was still nippy outside and that jacket of his probably wasn't really warm enough. I wasn't about to say anything though. Fox brought out the few mother hen tendancies that I have, but at the same time I knew better than to indulge them and start a fight. He hates being fussed over even worse than I do. 

"Scully's on the warpath with me as is," he said. "It might be the better part of valor to just stay here and brace for the hurricane." 

And hurricane it would be. The boys were coming for the weekend. Don't get me wrong, I love those two boys as if they were my own, but a tropical storm would definitely wreck less havoc on my household than those two. Billy was nearly six and mostly a quiet kid, could keep himself amused for hours with a pile of books. But his younger brother Charlie was three and could give old Nick himself a run for the money when it came to hellraising, and he always seemed to pull Billy into his schemes as well. I thought a few short sharp ones to the backside might improve his disposition, but Scully and Fox were a united front when it came to their stand against corporal punishment, and as the stepfather, I was definitely the minority dissenting opinion. 

"Oh, hey," Fox said as he stepped out the door, just before it closed behind him. "You got some real mail today. Something that isn't a bill." 

Interesting. "See ya soon," I said as I closed the door behind him. I went right to the small table by the door where the mail went. There, right on top of the small pile of bills with their cellophane window envelopes, was a thick letter with a handwritten address on creamy paper. I recognized the writing right away, with its curvy, elegant loops- my aunt Shirl. It was addressed, "Mr. John Jay Doggett and Mr. Martin Fox," Martin David Fox being the name Fox was going by these days, what with all of that trouble we were involved in not so far behind us. 

Okay, I recognize a wedding invitation when I see one, but who the hell was getting married? Presumably one of Aunt Shirl's brood, but most of them were married already. And who the heck told her about Fox and me? And why wasn't she breathing hellfire and damnation down my neck? I love my Aunt Shirl, of course, you have to love family, but she and her fundamentalist ways are part of the reason I don't have much use for religion. More curious than I was before, I tore open the envelope. "John Jay and Martin" was written on the inner envelope. It took a few seconds of sorting through extra envelopes and reception cards and the whole extra frippery of the average wedding invitation until I found the actual invitation. I read through it quickly. 

I just about whooped when I discovered who was getting married. My favorite cousin Billie Jo was getting hitched. She was a youngin' of only thirty-five or so. I was older than her by, well, I don't care to count the years anymore. Let's just say I changed her diapers and babysat her a few times for my Aunt Shirl. Now she was finally getting married to some guy named Jonathan Ian Shore. I think if I'd still been in the Bureau, I'd have been tempted to run a background check on him. I hoped he was a good choice for my favorite baby cousin and sincerely wished that she'd end up with a man half as good as the man I had. 

Damn. In my excitement about going to the wedding, thoughts of seeing the family again, the whole extended family, I'd almost forgotten about Fox. How was he going to feel about this? He'd met my mother, but that was it as far as family went. Ma, she must have been the one to tell Aunt Shirl and Billie Jo. But who else had she told? Dear God! If Aunt Shirl knew, that was just about as good as telling the whole damn world. Tucking the invitation away carefully, I went to go start dinner and ruminate on this developement. I wasn't sure how Fox would take to the prospect of being dumped into the middle of the chaos that was my extended family for the long weekend that would be the full festivities surrounding this long awaited wedding. You know, Fox pretty much didn't have any family anymore, besides me and the boys, and he'd never had much to start with. A sister and his parents, who'd been only children, so he didn't have any cousins. Me, I have thirty first cousins, most of whom live in a fifty mile radius of the town I grew up in. That's just on my Dad's side. I have more on my Ma's side, and sure enough some of them would be invited to the wedding too, just because they were Dad's family. 

By the time I heard the crunch of tires up the driveway, I had a tray of macaroni and cheese in the oven for the boys and a couple of salmon fillets ready to go under the broiler for Fox and myself. I'd also taken the time to finish a few dishes Fox had left in the sink and savored a few, last moments of my clean house. I can't help it. My years in the military only intensified my natural tendancies. I like a clean and orderly house. 

Moments later, the three of them swarmed into the house. Charlie burst into the house as soon as Fox had the door open. Fox followed close on his heels, Billy was last. Charlie didn't bother to say hello, but ran through the kitchen, probably intending to head upstairs to the bedroom he shared with his brother, where we kept the toys. Fox hurried after, saying, "Hey, get back here." 

I shut the door behind Billy, who was looking around the kitchen as if he were lost. He clutched an ice cream cone in his hand, dripping down his fingers. The ice cream was strawberry probably, and rivulets of pink covered his hands, starting to drip on my floor. Probably Charlie had one as well, presumably in a similar state of melting. Must have been why Fox had taken off after the kid so avidly. He knew exactly what I'd say if the kid got it anywhere. Cursing Fox silently, I took charge of Billy. "Okay," I said, trying to pry the soggy cone out of his hand. "I think you're about done with this." 

"No, I'm not," he said, not giving it up without a struggle, which of course would serve to spread the mess further. Of course. I should know better than to try and divest a five year old of ice cream. But dinner was going to be in about ten minutes. What the hell had Fox been thinking? Getting them ice cream? When he knew that I'd be fixing dinner? 

"I think you are, buddy," I said, grabbing a fresh rag and wetting it in the sink. "A few last licks, but we're having dinner right away. There's more ice cream in the freezer and you can have it after dinner." 

At last, I was able to persuade Billy to hand over the cone and present his little hands for washing up. As I ran the dishrag over the small fingers, I was reminded, not for the first time, of another little set of hands that I'd washed up. I wondered sometimes, as I did now, if I wasn't obsessively stern with this pair of boys to convince myself that I wasn't spoiling them because of the other boy I'd lost. I rubbed his face clean with the wet cloth because he let me. Billy was fairly passive, as little boys went. Then I sent Billy to go hang up his coat. 

As Billy was taking his coat off, Fox came back into the kitchen, Charlie tucked under his arm, kicking, screaming and waving his arms, a full blown temper-tantrum. "Noooooo!" he screamed. "I don't want too!" 

Fox set him down on the linoleum nearby Billy. Charlie's face was covered with what could only be chocolate ice cream. The cone itself was nowhere evident, perhaps due to the fact that Charlie always bolted his ice cream and sweets while Billy savored them slowly. "You have to take your coat off," Fox said, reaching for the zipper on Charlie's jacket. Charlie slapped Fox's hands away. 

"No!" 

"Why not?" Fox asked. Certain things you didn't ask a kid why, you just made sure they did it. Unless you're Fox. 

"No!" 

I had the feeling that the coat had nothing to do with this little struggle, that Charlie was just feeling contrary and acting up in reaction to having been hauled across half the metro area. I decided that the best thing would be to stay out of this little issue between him and Fox. Sometimes I felt a bit guilty and I wondered at times like this, if it weren't for me, would Fox have stayed with Scully and given the boys an intact home? It wasn't easy on anyone involved to have them shuttled back and forth between two homes with two routines and two sets of rules. I had to conclude, as I always did, that Fox and Scully just were never meant to be, and that I had nothing to do with it. Thinking anything else would just drive me crazy. 

"Did you want to go back home to Mom?" Fox asked. 

"No!" 

"Okay, but then you have to take off your coat." 

Eventually, the coat came off and was hung in the right spot, but not before Billy had drifted away and buried himself in a book. At five, the kid read stuff I was struggling through in fifth grade. He was reading a biography of Albert Einstein even. We finally pryed the book out of his hands and dragged him to the table. Of course, once there, they hardly ate at all, just like I'd have expected with ice cream in their tummies. I held my tongue though, saving it for later. When the kids had gone to bed, I'd speak my piece. It was more important to present a united front than to let my opinions be known. 

Small portions of dinner were eaten. It was judged that insufficient dinner had been eaten for dessert to be offered, but that wasn't such a big issue. Charlie fell asleep over his plate of macaroni and Fox ferried him up to bed while I had Billy help me clear the table. Before we were finished, I could tell that he was drooping, so I took Billy upstairs. It didn't take long for him to change into his jammies. I tucked him into his bed, then Fox came in and did it too, just to make sure it stuck. Before we were finished, Billy was fast asleep, his brownish red hair sticking up all over, looking suspiciously like it might be curly someday. Fox said his sister had curly hair, or at least, the clones that they'd made from her genes had curly hair. Fox's hair was stick straight, but maybe with the funny way genes worked, Billy would get those curls. 

Either way, the pair of them, each tucked into their bed, was so sweet I had to step out of the room before Fox finished checking to make sure they were settled. Bittersweet, they call this kind of pain that comes from something so wonderful. My own son would be far too grown to need to be tucked in by now anyway, a grown man, twenty-one years old. 

I went into the bathroom, to brush my teeth and start settling in for the night, more or less ignoring the little pulls on my heart strings. It was so long ago, I should be over it by now and mostly I was. After a while, Fox came and stood in the doorway watching me brush. I spit toothpaste foam and rinsed, then I said, "What the hell were you thinking, Fox? Getting them ice cream? You must have known I'd have dinner ready?" 

"Okay, tough guy, next week, you pick them up and drive them home, in Friday afternoon traffic, when Scully has just decided it's a great idea to take naps out of their daily schedule so they'll sleep at night," Fox said. He sighed and rubbed his forehead. I decided I was thankful that he didn't pick up the gauntlet that I'd thrown down. It could have been the start of a bitter fight, had he decided he was going to get into it with me. It'd been tough enough to get some dinner down the kids throat and we were both ragged from the evening so far. 

"No nap? No wonder they both just collapsed like that," I said. It wasn't even seven-thirty yet. "What do you suppose our chances are that they won't be up by six?" 

"Not likely. We'd better get to bed early," he said. He walked into the bathroom and stood behind me. He put his hands on my hips and leaned over to kiss the back of my neck. He ground his hips into my backside as he nuzzled me. He can melt me with moves like that, and I found myself completely forgetting that I was supposed to be angry with him. The unfinished dishes and the piles of toys and books that had already sprouted in the living room suddenly didn't matter at all. "I can think of another very good reason to get to bed early." 

"Oh, yeah?" I asked. 

"Yeah. Get your ass in bed, tough guy," he said. "And just maybe I'll show you." 

I put my toothbrush away and let Fox pull me out of the bathroom by my belt buckle. The belt that I wore for jeans these days was a gift from Fox, hand tooled black leather with a silver and turquoise buckle, not particularly flashy or big. But as Fox had said just after he gave it to me, "You know what they say, the bigger the buckle, the more they're trying to compensate for." 

In short order, he had me in the bedroom and had the buckle undone. A few more moments and the jeans that the belt had been holding up were down around my ankles. He tackled me onto the bed and peppered my face with kisses. I fought back against this assault in equal measure though it seemed he was winning. Or I was winning, rather. His kisses made their way down my neck and I was all but flying as they trailed all the way down my belly. By the time he'd reached my pubic hair, I was already hard. He licked my cock like it was an ice cream cone. No, like it was the last ice cream cone he was ever going to have and he was going to extract his full measure of pleasure out of it. I was so spinning with the enjoyment of his enjoyment of me that I hardly noticed his invading finger, and then only when he found my prostate. Oh, yeah. I could hardly decided whether to bear down on his finger or to buck up into his sweet, wet, wonderful mouth. His second finger slipped in just as easy as the first, same for the third. Oh, yeah. 

Before long, he took his mouth away from my cock and his fingers out of me. Before I could protest, he'd flipped me over onto my hands and knees and mounted me. His cock pressed up against my ass which felt vacant, in need something to fill it. His body was hot and heavy, draped over mine. There is something so welcome about feeling his weight on me at times like this, like it belonged on me, almost as if we were part of the same being, one weight, one gravity. His breath was warm on my neck. We both shuddered as he slid home with slow but persistant force. He didn't wait for me to adjust to his presence. He didn't need to. This had become familiar to us, this kind of love making. With undeniable need, he took me. I let him. Let him take us both to heights of joy that I'd never experienced with any other lover before. His thrusts were slow, but deep. When he moved his hand to my cock, I knew it wouldn't be long until I came, but I was okay with that. More than okay. By now, I was whispering a stream of mixed profanities and pleas, the meaningless little nothings that escape your mouth when you're really flying. 

He took my orgasm from me with fast strokes on my cock, and by this time, I was far too gone to do more than cry out wordlessly. He came just after I did. I came to my senses just in time to hear him cry out and stiffen against me. By now, I was practically pressed flat to the bed, so I just let myself slump all the way. He lay stretched out on top of me, still in me. Sometimes I thought that might be one of my favorite parts, the feeling of him in me as we cuddled. He kissed the back of my head, my neck, my right ear, the one cheek I had turned to him. What sweetness to feel Fox's love like this. 

"What's a hot number like you doing, putting up with an old wreck like me?" he said. 

"I'd say that around here, you're the hot number," I said. At the time I first met Fox just over six years ago, he was one of the best looking guys I knew, and he still was. 

We cuddled like this for as long as we could, but eventually Fox had to roll off me. As I felt grateful for being able to breathe deeply again, Fox pulled off the condom I hadn't even realized he'd put on. He tied it off and got out of bed to throw it out. I reached under the bed for the baby wipes. Charlie had finished potty training last month finally, but for reasons I didn't understand, we'd still had three big things of baby wipes that had been opened but mostly not used. Might as well put them to good use. I wiped myself up and dabbed at the wet spot as best as I could, then tossed the used wipes into the bedside trashbasket. 

When Fox came back to bed, he snuggled in behind me and asked, "Who was the wedding invitation from?" 

I smiled at the reminder. "My baby cousin Billie Jo is getting hitched." 

"Just Billy Joe? Not Billy Joe Jim Bob?" he asked. Sometimes, he gave me a hard time about my Southern origins. He pushed it too hard, I just called him a damn Yankee. That usually shut him up. Or just made him laugh, which was good enough. 

"It's Willamina Josephine, actually. So, you wanna go? Or if you want, we can think of some excuse for you if you want to duck out gracefully. But I have to go." 

"Are you crazy? I finally get a chance to meet some of your family and you think I want to skip out?" 

"My family is a bit much sometimes, Fox. You know. Big Southern family. I've got over thirty first cousins. When Billie Jo's sister Charmaine got married, there were over five hundred at the wedding." 

"I want to meet them all," Fox insisted. He looked at his left hand. About two years ago, I'd gotten him a gold band set with a row of diamonds. An engagement ring I'd said at the time. He'd gotten me a matching one. We talked vaguely sometimes about setting a date for a committment ceremony of some kind, but in my heart, it always felt like we were married that day I gave it to him, and that we didn't need anything more. "I want to eat wedding cake and dance and drink. Oh, hell. There will be drinking and dancing, won't there? Your family aren't strict Baptists, are they?" 

"Some are, most aren't. Don't worry, they'll be plenty to drink," I said. Still, I wasn't sure Fox knew what he was getting himself into. 

Fox must have interpreted that my worry was that my family wouldn't accept us. "At least some of them must be okay with it, otherwise, we wouldn't have gotten a joint invitation." 

"It's not that. They can take us or leave us. I don't care what they think. My Ma likes you and that's all that matters. You just have no idea what a family of this size is like," I said. "These things just get out of hand. To give you an idea, for my cousin Betty Sue's wedding, they had a pork pull just for the rehersal dinner." 

"Is that why you've been putting off setting a date for our ceremony? Afraid it won't live up to family standards?" 

"It's not that and you know it," I said, defensively. I loved this man with every fiber of my being, and everyone that counted knew this. Why did we have to get up front of a crowd and say it? 

"Never mind. I want to go. Should I tell Scully we can't have the boys that weekend?" 

"No," I said. "Ask her if we can take them with. I'll have to call up Aunt Shirl and ask her if it's okay, but there's always a crowd of kids at these things. They say there will be a babysitter for the ceremony itself." 

And so it was decided. We'd be going back home, to the small town just outside of Atlanta that I'd grown up in, to see my favorite cousin get married. This should prove to be interesting, to say the least. 

I didn't need to dig out my address book to find Aunt Shirl's number. Some phone numbers are just engraved on your memory, from the number of times you've called them. The next morning, as soon as I could be sure that she was up, I grabbed the phone and dialed that number. Someone picked up the phone after two rings and said, "Doggett residence." 

It was a familiar voice, so I took a chance, knowing it could well be one of her sisters. They all sounded so alike and a couple of them, there being six in all, got miffed if you mistook one for the other. "Billie Jo? Is that you? It's John Jay." 

She just about screamed. I had to hold the phone away from my ear as she called out, "John Jay!" Then she added at a more reasonable volume, "I was just about ready to call you, John Jay. Did you get my invitation? Will you be a groomsman? That no good brother of mine has disappeared again, said he was going to Europe for a few months. I just said fudge on him, and took him off the list." 

John Curtis, the brother in question, was a bit of an adventurous soul. He'd come home and get a menial job, live at home and work just long enough to save up money for his next trip. Year long abscences were not unheard of with him. He might be home for the wedding, but you couldn't count on him having plane fare for the trip. 

Meanwhile, Billie Jo continued, "Tell me you'll do it, John Jay. You're my favorite cousin and you know it. You'd have been my first choice, except I had to ask John Curtis. Say you'll do it." 

What could I do? "Okay, I'll do it. Am I going to have to travel home to get fitted for the penguin suit? Oh, hey, I wanted to ask, would it be okay if we bring Martin's boys?" 

"Your Martin has kids? Oh, John Jay, I'm sorry for leaving them off the invitation. I didn't know. Of course they can come. The more the merrier." 

"Didn't Ma tell you Martin has kids? Their names are Billy and Charlie. Five and three." 

"No, I only heard from your sis, Elaine, that you'd settled down again. I had to pull the name out of your Ma like I was pulling teeth." 

"Uh, Billy Jo? Does your Ma know I'm coming with a man?" I asked, suddenly worried. My Ma hadn't told anyone about Martin beyond my siblings, at my request. I just didn't want to get people worked up over something like that. I could handle the heat of my family's disapproval. Hell, they were Army people, and I'd gone into the Marines. But I didn't want to plunge Fox into a situation where he'd have to face it. 

"Oh, of course. I had to tell Ma. She put up a fit at first, wouldn't hear of having the pair of you, but I fussed right back at her until she gave in, and kept fussing until she thinks that inviting the pair of you was her idea in the first place. Now, don't you worry your pretty little head, John Jay Doggett. The family's been told, and we're all champing at the bit to meet your Martin. Elaine says he's a real looker and that you landed yourself a hot one." 

I couldn't think of a person in the world besides Billie Jo that could get away with telling me not to worry my pretty little head. She continued, "And well, anyone who's unhappy about it, you know your Ma. Thinks the sun rises and sets cause of you. She won't hear a bad word said about you. And I think she even likes your Martin better than you." 

"You've got that right," I said. Just at that minute, Charlie showed up at my side, tugging my shirt, starting the potty dance. Most of the time it was great, getting a second chance to be a parent, though I can say I'll be glad for the day when Charlie feels grown up enough to escort himself to the potty. "Look, I gotta go. Charlie needs me. I'll call soon for details. Congratulations, hun." 

"See you soon, John Jay," she said and hung up. I put the phone down and went to go be a daddy. 

* * *

Luckily, I didn't have to go far to get fitted for the penguin suit. Either Billie Jo or her groom had fairly decent taste and had picked something simple. For all that it was white tie and tails, that is. I'd have to warn Fox that he might want to get his tuxedo out of the back of his closet for this. 

I'm glad I didn't take Fox with me for the first fitting. The guy measuring me got a little too friendly if you know what I mean. Fox's razor sharp tongue would have slashed the guy to bits. I thought it flattering but annoying. One minor snarl and he got his hand off my ass pretty quickly. For the next fitting, I brought Fox along, just in case anyone else got any ideas. 

Other than that, everything went according to plan. Plane tickets, packing, wedding gift buying, all went off without a hitch. 

"You're absolutely sure you want to take both of them along for the whole long weekend?" Scully asked when Fox and I came to pick the pair of them up on the Wednesday evening before we left. We were heading off in the morning. She seemed like she was working really hard to keep the note of glee out of her voice, but the glimmer in her eyes was unmistakeable. I could see visions of long, uninterrupted bubble baths, evenings spent with good novels and pints of premium ice cream in that glimmer. I wondered if we were really thinking clearly here. We'd never travelled with the boys before. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea. 

"Oh, absolutely certain," Fox said, blythly. I wondered if sometime soon, we'd regret those words. 

Thursday morning found us searching high and low for our plane tickets. We could find neither hide nor hair of them, though I know I'd put them up safely weeks earlier. I paused in the middle of my search, thinking that Charlie was behaving himself awfully well, quietly amusing himself with cutting up some paper. Then it occured to me. I crept up on him quietly and said, "Hey, bud, whatcha cutting up there?" 

I grabbed a handful of scraps. They were small, but I was definitely able to figure out that this was our late, lamented airline tickets. 

"Fox!" I called. "I found 'em." 

He hurried in from the other room. "Great! Let's get going." 

"Not so great," I said sourly, motioning at the child, who was still blythly cutting up the remains of the tickets. At moments like this, despite his red hair, Charlie was all Fox, with that grin and bold assurance that he could wiggle his way out of any trouble. "Your son," I said, with emphasis on your. "Is turning them into confetti." 

Fox acted decisively. "I'll deal with Charlie," he said. "They were e-tickets, just go print them again. We can still make the flight." 

I don't know or care how he dealt with Charlie, but finally we were in the car, about ready to go. Luckily, I decided to do a head count before we headed off. We were one short. Billy. It took another few precious minutes to find him, head in a book, in his room. Rather than separate them, I just hauled the boy and his book out of the house bodily. He giggled a little as I hoisted him over my shoulder, but kept reading. 

At last, we were on our way and touching down in Atlanta a few hours later. Rental car under our belts, I drove us down the highways to my old hometown. At first the roads weren't familiar. They'd been built or improved since the last time I'd spent any amount of time in the area. but once we reached the far reaches of the Atlanta metro area, things started to look familiar again. I passed stores that I once knew. And finally, were in my old stomping grounds. I was able to point out things like, "That was the park were I snuck out with my friends and had my first beer." Only after looking in the back and seeing that little pitchers with their big ears were fast asleep in their car seats. 

"You sure you don't want to back out?" I asked, feeling more than a little trepidation. The airconditioning in the little tin box rental car was working overtime already for all that it was only the first weekend of June, and I was starting to sweat. Ah, sweet home Georgia. You know, it was one thing to plan to go home again, bringing home a man to meet the family even with the reassurances of one's Ma and favorite cousin, it was another thing entirely to be looking that doom square in the face. I tried to tell myself that I didn't care what the hell anyone thought. Sure, I didn't. Pull the other one. It's got bells. 

"You nervous?" Fox asked as we pulled into the city limits. 

"You've never met my family. You've got no idea what we could be walking into here." 

"What? Like Steel Magnolias?" Fox asked. 

"I wouldn't know. I've never seen the movie," I said. Steel Magnolias? Wasn't that a chick movie? You could call Fox lots of things, but hung up on his own masculinity was not one of them. "You've seen Steel Magnolias?" 

"Blame Scully," he admitted cheerfully. 

Before long, we pulled into the driveway of the house I'd spent most of my childhood in. It'd been new when my parents had bought it in the mid-sixties. It had seemed huge, shiny new and luxurious when I was a kid, and, wonder of wonders, it had a bedroom I had to share with only one of my brothers. Now, it was a kind of tired looking ranch house, seemed pretty small too. How had we managed to squeeze five kids into that house? and the occasional cousin too? I counted the pickup trucks in the long gravel-paved drive. I recognized most of them, same as the last time I was home. My brother Randall, the one I'd shared the bedroom with, was here. Elaine was here, so was Carlton and Janie. And Ma. So, the immediate family was here, along with Elaine's husband, Trevor. That meant probably Elaine's twin girls were here as well. 

Just before I pulled the little rental into a parking spot on the grass, I said, "Last chance to ditch." 

"Forget it, tough guy. If I can handle Bill Scully Jr., I think I can handle your brothers," Mulder said. 

Before I could even get out of the car, the welcoming committee had arrived. Of my siblings, only Elaine had actually met Fox so far, making a special trip to DC to do it, and she was at the head of it. She's the one who looks most like me, with straight, brown hair, lean and rangy, with the same forehead wrinkles I was cursed with. Close behind her were were her twins, small, minature copies of her, with no wrinkles yet, but a habitual scowl that knit their eyebrows together. 

Fox was out of the car before me and he swooped down on Elaine's twins. Daisy and Maggie, they were named. I know he loved being Daddy, but part of me suspected that he liked being Uncle even better. It allowed him free reign with his love for kids, without the reins that proper discipline demanded with one's own kids. As Fox lifted first one, then the other into the air, Elaine took me by the hand, "Get your boys, John Jay, and come on into the house. You know, you shouldn't be such a stranger. Been too long since y'all have come home." 

I wanted to squeeze her in a hard embrace as I realized just how much I had missed her, but she seemed more fragile than I remembered her. She was getting old, I thought. She wasn't the only one. Sad in a way, she was my big sis, the oldest of us and she was supposed to be bigger than me, and thoroughly able to beat the tar out of me, without breaking one of her immaculately polished nails, or mussing one strand of her perfectly coifed hair. 

Next I spoke to Carlton. I'd let Elaine go to get the sleeping Charlie out of his car seat and suddenly Carlton was by my side. He was just like our dad was- tall, craggy, and generally, very quiet, kept his counsel. "These your Martin's boys?" he asked, looking into the car with me. It wasn't that his voice was particularly soft, but there was always something gentle about Carlton, just like there had been about my father, something I aspired to. I nodded. Charlie's hair, though we'd brushed it neatly just before leaving the airport, had flared up wildly and stood up in little spikes. He was just starting to stir fussily. "That must be Charlie," Carlton said. "I'll get him. You get the other. Then we'll take them in and you can explain why you've been such a stranger as of late." 

Meanwhile, both of the twins were still hanging on Fox. And Janie, the baby of the family, and Sharon, Carlton's wife, had insinuated themselves into conversation with Fox. They both seemed charmed by him. Janie was little and cute. The long blonde hair she sported now had been natural when she was a girl, though these days, she was more of a blond by choice. She'd been doing it so long that I hadn't even known she dyed until the day she came home from Army basic training with hair that was both short and brown. Sharon, on the other hand, was tall and one of the most stunning looking woman I'd ever met. Not entirely to my taste, though you had to admit I had a weak spot for another tall, leggy brunette. 

Only Randall hung back. He looked over the scene, not seeming pleased. I thought we'd be hearing from him later about it all. I shrugged. Out of all the people I whose opinions I was pretending not to be worried about, my little brother Randall was the least of it. I walked around the car and got Billy out of the car. He was deep in his nap and nothing was going to disturb it until he was good and ready. He didn't even stir slightly as I unbuckled him and hauled him out. God, he was getting heavy. He was a big boy and all bone and muscle. 

We went in through the side door by the garage. I don't think anyone ever used the front door. Ma was in the kitchen, cooking up a storm. Lovely, fragrant steam filled the room. I thought I smelled greens, bean soup, and something with peaches, maybe a cobbler, maybe pie. She handed her wooden spoon to Janie and all but ran to me. Janie was the only one in the family who looked a lot like Ma, built on the compact model. Actually, I was mistaken. She wasn't heading towards me, but toward Fox. 

"Daisy, Maggie, you let that man go," she scolded. "All this gambolling, you'll wake the boys up." Fox was still burdened with my nieces. One had draped herself over his back, arms wrapped around his neck and he was holding the other by her waist. He set them down on the kitchen floor, looking almost as chastened as they were. Then Ma wrapped him in her arms. I thought I might be jealous. 

The girls ran out to the yard again. It did my heart good to see that there was still someplace in the world where kids could roam free, without much in the way of worry. It was a lay-awake-all-night, haunt-your-nightmares worry of mine that if we hadn't allowed Luke so much freedom to ride around the block, then he wouldn't have ended up dead. When I was a kid, we'd run around all day and into the evening, playing down in the ravine behind the house, riding our bikes into town, running through the fields. We might come in for lunch, or maybe not at all if we could talk our friends' moms into feeding us. 

Charlie didn't end up waking up after all, but drifted right back to sleep, snuggling into Carlton's shoulder as if it were my own. "Put the boy's down in your old bedroom, John Jay," Ma said, so Carlton and I headed that way. Fox extricated himself from Ma and the other women and followed, probably anxious to know that they'd be safe and at hand. 

"So," Carlton began as he tucked a light blanket over Charlie. Carlton had had his kids young and they were all nearly grown by now, but he was an experienced daddy. "I hear you two are going to have one of them, whatchamacallit. Committment ceremonies. Have you set a date yet?" 

The one thing, the one single thing I had not expected out of my brother Carlton was that he would take this with such cool aplomb. He'd taken the news by phone call smoothly, but I was sure that he just needed some time to react and think about what he was going to say. He was always slow to talk, long to think about something before he opened his mouth. But he was also the most religious and conservative of us. 

"We..." I was about to say that as far as I was concerned, we already were married, but Fox piped up before I could finish. 

"As soon as your brother here makes up his mind to stop pussyfooting around," Fox said. 

"John Jay, you stay at the house with your boys. Your Martin and I are going to go for a walk," Carlton said. I watched pretty much helplessly as Carlton called his dog. Beau, the dog, was a big black and tan coonhound, placid and well mannered now that he was approaching his later years. Before I knew it, Fox and Carlton were out the door, Beau at their heels. Carlton grabbed a leash, but I knew he never used it on Beau. He was going to pump Fox for information, give him the third degree. I somehow thought Fox would stand up under my brother's scruntiny though. 

What happened next was a lot of hen fussing and gossip. Randall and my brothers in law managed to make themselves scarce, leaving me to the tender mercies of my sisters and Ma. You don't want to hear about it. They pretty much extracted my life story from the point where I'd last visited, over five years ago. They wanted to hear all about Fox, even those who had pretty much heard the whole story already. Sometimes I was reminded just why I don't visit more often. Sometimes, I wondered why I stayed away. I swear, only the presence of Ma prevented them from asking for intimate details of my sex life with Fox and whether I pitched or caught. I was caught up on all the local gossip and feed pieces of peach pie fresh out of the oven, and coffee strong and black. And I ended up feeling both immensely loved and henpecked at the same time. It made me want to go out to the garage and get some grease on my hands, just to counteract the excess estrogen. 

"I should get up and check on the boys," I said after a long spell. "They sleep much longer, they'll be up all night." 

"Oh, they've been up for a while," Sharon said. "Julianne is minding them. She took them out to the back yard." 

Julianne was my fifteen year old niece, Carlton's youngest. Even the last time I'd seen her, at ten, she'd been a real natural with kids, a real baby charmer. But she could be kind of flighty at times. Or at least she had been at ten. 

"Does she know not to take them to the ravine? They don't know how to watch for snakes. They're city boys," I said, suddenly worried. 

"She knows, John Jay," Sharon said. "And she knows kids like you wouldn't believe. She can handle Daisy and Maggie all by herself already." 

That was saying something, but then again, she'd never met Fox's devil child, had she? Fox's boys weren't exactly normal kids, not by a long shot. I moved to the kitchen window, to take a look. She had the boys parked in the yard, playing with some of the old metal Tonka trucks left over from my childhood. All good for now, I supposed. 

After a while more of this feminine torture, Fox and Carlton showed up. And then the females shooed all of the menfolk out of the kitchen, which I guessed meant that dinner preperations were about to reach fever pitch. I could certainly cook, but something stopped me from offering to pitch in. Perhaps it was just that I was already overloaded with feminine company for the day. Perhaps it was a certain tradition, that it was always the ladies that cooked these big family dinners. I managed to sneak Fox away for a few minutes conversation. I pulled him into the garage. After I grabbed the beer that I knew would be in the old fridge, offering one to Fox and having it refused, I said, "What'd Carlton want to talk about?" Only then did I crack it open and chug a few cold gulps down. Normally, I'm not much of a drinker, but just being around my family gets to me. I needed one to smooth my nerves a little. 

"I think I was being vetted to see if I'm worthy. He all but asked me what my prospects were," Fox said, a kind of grin on his face. Good for him that he found this all still amusing. At least that was one of us. 

"And..." 

"I told him that I was quite able to keep you in the manner to which you'd become accustomed," Fox said. Now he'd moved on to outright smirking. 

"Fox!" I hissed, an outraged whisper. 

Damn him, he laughed at me, then said, looking so handsome, with that devil-may-care grin of his that I couldn't be angry with him, "No, didn't say that. I did let him know that money isn't one of our worries. I think I passed muster. I hope. He didn't tell me never to darken your door again at least." 

"What'd you tell him?" I asked, more curious than anything. 

"The truth. The abreviated version anyway," Fox said. My family knew a little corner of the truth, about how I met Fox, it was only a little bit more extensive than the usual story we told casual acquaintances about how we met. I'd filled my family in without much details about the struggle that had just ended a few years back. They'd heard that I was secretly fighting certain rogue elements within the government. They didn't know anything about the aliens or the supersoldiers or anything like that. They didn't need to know. They'd just been told that I'd met Fox and we'd fallen in love while I was doing this. Anything more was more than they needed to know. They didn't need to know that I actually met Fox while searching for him when he'd been abducted by aliens, and that he'd been buried for three months and came back from the grave. I'm the black sheep of my family enough already without them thinking I needed to be committed. 

Then there was a bloodcurdling shriek from the yard. I dropped my beer and went running. Definitely sounded like Charlie, or if not him, then another kid. 

It wasn't. It was Julianne. Charlie had found a way up to the roof of the garage and was walking along the ridgepole, cool as a cucumber and just as happy as could be, enjoying the view apparently. He'd climbed up on top of our garage before and we'd worked extra hard to impress on him that that just wasn't done. That was bad enough. Our garage roof had a fairly shallow pitch to it. This roofline wasn't just steep, but Charlie was set to fall, should he fall, right into a bush full of thorns. I just about panicked and was starting to look around for a ladder, but Fox took charge. Only my trust in Fox let me let him handle this in his own way. 

"Hey, cowboy," he called out. "Get your ass off that garage and down here." 

When Charlie hesitated, out of sheer willfullness, rather than any hint that he was afraid, Fox said, "Charles John Scully, you will come down here and talk to me." 

The kid was mature for his age sometimes. You could hear it in his voice, like he was already a teenager. Fox didn't help, the way he almost never talked to the boy like he was the young child he still was. "Do I have to?" Charlie asked. 

"Not only do you have to, you have to right now," Fox said. Charlie sank down so he was straddling the ridge, then he swung one of his little legs over. He scooted down the roof on his butt. Once he reached the edge, he clambered down the way he must have gotten up. Just like a little monkey, he swung down the garage's gutter, then climbed down the downspout until he was standing on the water barrel it was attached too. Before city water had gotten this far out, Ma had always collected rainwater for her flowers, so as to not tax the well unnecessarily. I guess she still did it out of habit. Charlie jumped off the water barrell into Fox's waiting arms. 

"Okay, bud," Fox said, after he'd given Charlie a brief hug, perhaps the only way you could tell that Charlie had given Fox a fright too. "I'm going to ask you if you remember that conversation we had last month about roofs." 

"But that's different!" 

"Why?" 

"That's not our garage." 

"Bud, you need to extrapolate from that conversation, from the specific to the general. If I say it's not okay to climb on our garage roof, then it's generally a safe bet that no other roof is okay to climb on. Kind of like you can't run out into the street, whether it's Maple, or Main. Do you understand?" 

"No roofs," Charlie said. He added, sadly, "At all. But you said I could when I was older. I'm older now." 

"Not old enough." 

A small crowd of family had gathered at Julianne's scream, and most of them hadn't dispersed, watching with fascination at Fox's unique child rearing techniques. Fox believed in explaining everything logically and reasonably. And though he never hit either of our children, he always made sure that there were consequences. And if I were honest, I'd have to admit that they that probably worked better on Charlie than spanking. I'd never seen him spanked, but I've seen Charlie get up from a dozen small accidents, bleeding even, but going right back to play, that I figured mere physical pain wasn't going to be much a deterrent to him. But then, with a spanking done right, the physical pain is the least of it. 

"I expected better from you. You're going to go inside now and sit in a corner for ten minutes," Fox said. That was the longest he ever used, a really severe consequence. Charlie might have been one of the brightest three year olds around, but there were limits to how long he could sit before he started wiggling. Then came the real kicker, the one that let Charlie know Fox was serious. "And no dessert tonight. Inside, now." 

Charlie took his fate better than I thought he would. No tantrum, just a frown. "Mrs. Doggett, do you have a spare corner we could borrow?" 

"I told you, Martin, it's Ma or Marybelle," my Ma said, with a glimmer in her eye that could only be mischief. "How 'bout I show you John Jay's old corner?" 

Gee, Ma, why don't you just haul out the pictures of me as a naked baby and my bad school pictures with polyester shirts with spread collars and show him those too? I thought. 

Janie came up to me, slipping her arm around my waist. She was always the cuddliest, clingiest of us. "Does he really talk to his kids that way all the time? Nothing bad on you, I know you're just the stepdad, but no wonder he was up on the roof." 

Janie raised her kids like the sargent she had been- strict, by the book and all mistakes corrected with immediate and dire discipline. They were good kids, no doubt, but I somehow pictured them throwing off everything they ever knew and running wild the instant they were out of her house. But our kids, well, it was hard to see from first impression, but Fox wasn't really permissive at all. They weren't brats, even though you could say Charlie was a bit of a free spirit. "Oh, it works for them. He'll never do it again. At least not that specific thing. He's just got far more imagination than a three year old should and you never know what he's going to get into next. It was our fault really. We should have known better than to trust him to Julianne, nothing against her. Charlie is just not your average three year old." 

We went inside, and, wouldn't you know it? Ma had dug out the old photo albums, turned over dinner to my sisters and was giving Fox the highlight tour of every bad hair cut I'd ever had, complete with side detours for particularly embarrassing moments with my siblings. 

Later that night, Fox and I were in bed together in my old room. Not that it'd remained as it was when I was growing up, thankfully. The pair of twin beds that Randall and I had used were gone, replaced with a double, just small enough for Fox and I to have to cuddle real close. The boys were currently bedded down on the basement rec room floor with the other kids and a handful of adults. They were out cold. Hopefully, they'd stay that way, but I inwardly shuddered at the thought of what kind of trouble a wakened Charlie could get into in a strange house with everyone else asleep. 

Fox started nuzzling my neck in a way that could mean he wanted only one thing. I pushed him away. "Uh-uh. Sorry, guy, but no. I just can't," I said, trying for firm and decisive. He poked his erection at me, grinding his hips against my ass, so I could feel quite clearly how badly he wanted me. He attempted to insinuate his hand into my pajama bottoms. I pushed it out again, but he did a pretty good imitation of an octopus and his hands were right back in place again before I knew it. "Fox! My Ma's in the next bedroom." 

"She was the one who insisted we have a bed together," Fox said. "Do you really think she doesn't have some idea of what could go on in this bed?" 

Well, I suppose, if I thought about it reasonably, as a grown man, then no, she probably wouldn't care, so long as we left the sheets reasonably clean. But my reactions weren't the reasonably thought out reactions of an adult man. No, being back home again, one became, to a certain extent, a child again. This was an instinctual reaction. A gut feeling. 

"I'm sorry. I just can't." 

Fox sighed, then rolled over onto his back. "Okay, if being at home is a turnoff, I'll cope." 

He was definitely pouting. I hated that. I had no clue how a grown man could not only get away with pouting, but actually make me feel guilty about being the cause. 

"Fox, don't be like that," I said. I turned around and attempted to pull him into my arms. He resisted. I pulled out a secret weapon. "Soon as we get back home and get the boys back to Dana, anything you want. You know, even one of your little games if you want." 

Fox was far more imaginatively perverse than I could even contemplate. Most of the time, he was just as happy as I was with plain vanilla sex. Every now and then though, he liked to step out, briefly, on the wild side. Maybe it was the result of watching too many of those videos of his. I don't know how you could get more kinky without actually getting into leather and whips and stuff, which was a place neither of us wanted to go. 

Fox tackled me and nuzzled me again. "Federal agent and fugitive?" he asked. 

I nodded. "If you want. But remember, last time you said I could play the fugitive the next time." 

"I did, didn't I?" Fox said. His lush, kissable lips twitched with a smile. "I know. The mechanic scenario." 

Of course. That meant I had to play the aggressor, not that I minded. What Fox got out of being forcefully bent over the hood of my pickup, I'll never know. I always prefer a simple bed to any scenario, no matter how hot. 

"Okay, fine, the mechanic and the helpless traveler," I conceded, as I took him into my arms. He laid his head on my chest with a happy sigh and one, playful lick of a nipple. After a little while of this, we drifted into our usual position for sleep, in a spoon, him on the outside, me on the inside. Life was good, I thought as I drifted to sleep. 

* * *

The next morning was a flustery kind of chaos that can only be achieved by a whole passel of women, packed into a house with too few bathrooms, all of them bent on one thing- looking good. Various teenaged nieces of mine were the worst offenders, as far as shower and mirror hogging, but my sisters did a good job at it too. The menfolk mostly stood back and watched, Fox with a kind of curious and confused horror. He'd never been in the midst of this kind of thing before, I could tell. My brothers, brothers in law and myself were long experienced in it. 

"Just stay out of the path of the cyclone and you'll be fine," my brother Carlton counseled Fox at one point. 

"Nobody'll be looking at the men, anyway," Randall added. Randall, wily as always, had gotten up nearly at dawn to grab his shower, long before anyone else had risen. He was dressed in part of a suit, his tie and jacket off to the side to be put on only at the absolute minute. 

I, too, had known better, and had been the second one in the bathroom after Randall. Fox, even thought I'd warned him, had elected to sleep a little longer. He was going to be facing a short, cold shower by the time the women were done with the bathrooms. We were all at the kitchen table, talking over cups of coffee until the storm was over. 

"So, what is it you do again?" Randall asked. Randall, surprisingly driven, had worked and scrabbled until he owned one of the biggest GM dealerships in the county, and thought rather big of himself. He wasn't happy though, I knew. He'd recently separated from his wife Linda. Neither Linda nor their kids were going to be at the wedding. 

"I'm a writer," Fox said. He was actually quite a successful one. He wrote under a pseudonym because he valued our privacy, but his books had almost a guaranteed slot on the best seller list. Even if I didn't work too, and even if Fox had never sold a single book, we'd still be quite comfortable. At various points during his old life, he was able to move significant amounts of family money he'd inherited into off-shore funds, places he could still get at it, even though Fox Mulder was officially a man wanted for murder. Fox could buy me a dozen dealerships the size of my brother Randall's. We weren't going to say that though. 

"A writer, huh? Anything I might have read?" 

"I didn't know you could read, Randall," I teased. 

"Better 'n you, jarhead," Randall snapped right back. I could tell that he was feeling mellow right at the moment, which is why I'd risked the taunt. Randall was Army too, career, but he'd gotten out right after the Gulf War. I can't say I blamed him. 

Before long, the girls were done with their primping, and Fox was able to grab his shower. I dressed the boys while he did that. The better part of valor had definitely dictated that we put that off until the last minute, boys being boys. Billy might have been quiet, but trust me, he was definitely capable of turning a set of nice clothes into a mess in seconds flat. 

Then we were off to the rehearsal. 

Janie had been there long before. She was the wedding planner, a career she'd gone into right after she'd left the army. According to her, mounting a major wedding wasn't that much different than an invasion. They both took tactics, strategy, skill, iron guts and the will to order around the troops. 

Once we got there, she took charge of us. "Okay, Fox, you might want to take the boys across the street to play in the park. The other kids are already over there. John Jay, you come with me, the groomsmen are getting into place now." 

Before I knew it, she had me by the elbow and was leading me away to the front of the church. When we were most of the way up the aisle, my cousin Billie Jo spotted me and broke away from the minister to run to me. 

Last time I'd seen her, she'd been a grown woman, but she'd still kept her adolescent awkwardness. She was always a pudgy girl, and she still was, but somehow, she'd blossomed into a woman with real presence and vitality. And her eyes always had been beautiful, dancing with intelligence. She was a human genetics researcher, something she'd kind of drifted into by accident. She'd started out in botany, but made her way into plant genetics. I guess on that kind of level, there's really not that much difference between plants and animals and there's just a lot more call for human geneticists. She and a bunch of her geek buddies had started a biotech firm about five years ago and it had just gone big time. 

"John Jay!" she said as she swooped down on me. "Where's your Martin? You promised me you'd bring him." 

"Col. Janie there sent him across the street with his boys and the rest of the kids," I said, as Janie caught up with us. 

"We've got to hurry," Janie said. "We've only got another hour in the church and a lot to do. John Jay, you go over there with the other groomsmen. Billie Jo, the minister's waiting." 

And so chastised, we went back to our places. My cousin Clayton, Billie Jo's big brother and one of the other groomsmen, took pity on me and introduced me round to the other seven groomsmen, most of whom I'd never met before. And the groom. 

Jonathan was a long, tall, drink of water, even compared to me and my brothers, and we're not exactly short. As he was introduced, he said, "Actually, I prefer Jon, but your family has way too many Johns already." 

All I knew about him otherwise was that he was one of the partners in Billie Jo's biotech firm. They didn't seem like they were well matched, at least not separated like they were, but he kept looking at her like she was a vision of an angel, come down to earth, and that satisfied me. The man obviously worshiped her. 

Actually, though, as the rehearsal continued, his voice seemed more and more familiar, like I'd talked to him before. By the time they got to where the vows would go, I'd placed him. The struggle. We'd worked with as many geneticists as we'd dared, on a strictly need to know basis, to understand some of the files that we'd retrieved. I'd talked with him on the phone, though others in the resistance had worked with him in person, just like I'd worked with Billie Jo. She was the only one in the family who had close to an idea of what it had all been about. Project Flashlight, we'd called that portion of the struggle. Fox had already met the groom, but in a context that seemed a million years and miles away from this normality. I could almost forget about that other life of ours sometimes, but this brought it back, hard and I was glad when the rehearsal was over. 

I escaped from the big brick Methodist church as quickly as I dared and walked right across the street to the park. Fox was pushing Charlie on a swing and Billy was playing nearby, building makeshift log cabins out of twigs. He was making a whole twig village, and had even started a stockade around the outside. 

I sat down on one of the swings, and as Fox continued to push Charlie, he asked, "Rehearsal over I guess?" 

"Yeah," I said, watching Charlie's orderly progress, in accordance to the laws of gravity. Up and down, in a regular trajectory determined by the length of the chain of the swing and the force of his father pushing him. It was reassuring to see, a reminder that all of that was over. That we survived, better than survived. Went on to love. To raise children, to live together. "We've met the groom before, Fox. Project Flashlight." 

"Yeah, I know," Fox said. "I think we're indirectly responsible for the bride and groom meeting, though who knows? Scully says the world of high level genetics work is still pretty small. He's also pretty darn good on the basketball court too. C'mon, let's get to the rehearsal lunch. I'm starving." 

* * *

Later that night was the bachelor party. Of sorts. As Billie Jo explained earlier, "Well, neither Jonathan or I really wanted to be hauled in front of strippers or subjected to that sort of thing. So we rented out the Y and we're having a co-ed bash. We're going to swim and play basketball, and have a weinie roast out back." 

I think I was kind of relieved. But I was sure Fox was disappointed. I had no doubt of his devotion to me, nor of his abiding and intense interest in members of the same sex, especially me. That said, when you came right down to it, Fox still liked to ogle naked women. I was still learning not to let that bother me. He claimed he was just a polymorphous pervert. I guess I could let him look at all the menus he wanted, so long as he ate at home. My own sexuality still balanced on a nervous edge. See, I'd been utterly sure I was straight. Until one day, Fox gave me the best blow job I'd ever had, and I was hooked on him. In the early days, I craved him like a drug. Still did, sometimes. He was an incredible lover and I wanted to look at no one else. But I was still not secure with the fact that the great love of my life had turned out to be another man, especially as time went on and I was realizing more and more that it wasn't just about the incredible sex, but about how good it was to be with him as a person, to raise his kids with him, to cook dinner with him. I'd bonded with him in a way I'd never anticipated being bonded with another human being, period, male or female. 

We left the boys in charge, not of Julianne, but of my Ma and Janie, who'd sworn up and down that she had what it took to keep Charlie in control. As we left, Fox was giving Janie the third degree. 

"I know, I know," she said, impatiently. "To keep him out of trouble, keep him busy, and you don't mean parking him in front of a video, because he gets bored easily with the television. I have both of your phone numbers in case anything goes wrong." 

"Good. I do mean it about keeping him busy," Fox said. "If you'd rather, I can stay home." 

"No, you get going, boys," Ma said. 

Once there, Fox naturally gravitated to the basketball courts, I went in search of Billie Jo. 

She'd never been much of an athlete, Billie Jo, so I found her, sitting on the bleachers, watching the basketball avidly. I wondered at that, until I saw that in the short time we'd been here, Fox had managed to wrangle himself into a one on one game with the groom. 

"Jonathan used to play college ball for IU. He quit because it was getting in the way of his studies," Billie Jo said, as Jonathan whipped a particularly sweet jump shot right into the net. Fox grabbed it on the rebound and had it dribbled to outside of the box in short order. He made a clear shot to the basket from outside the three point line. From what I could tell, they were about evenly matched. Fox was older, but Jonathan was no spring chicken himself. Jonathan was taller, but Fox was quicker, and Fox had an almost uncanny accuracy when it came to making shots from far away. It went on for a long time, and Fox looked like he was having one of the best times he'd had in years. I shot a few hoops with him sometimes, but I just wasn't much competition to him and my heart wasn't really in it. Much like he'd help me under the hood of car if I asked, but you could always tell he was waiting until he could wash his hands and get back to his writing. No, Fox was enjoying having a worthy opponent for the first time in a while. And I was thoroughly enjoying the sight of a sweaty, athletic Fox, working at his peak. Finally though, at a moment when Jonathan was ahead by a point, Fox tossed him the ball and said, "Okay, I give. This old man is through for now." 

"Old man, my ass," Jonathan said, wiping his face on his already damp shirt. Together they approached our seats in the bleachers and Jonathan said to me, "John, you tell your old man here it's not nice to concede just because it's my bachelor party." 

"Concede?" Fox said, sitting down next to me. His shirt was already sopping, so he reached out to me, and he was going to grab my still dry t-shirt to wipe his face with. I was quicker than him, and luckily, I had a towel handy. I gave that to him. After his face was dry, he said, "Hell, Jonathan, if I hadn't been playing my best, you'd have mopped the court with my ass and you know it." 

Jonathan laughed and said, "Same on this side. So, I hear you two are tying the knot too. You got a date yet?" 

Fox looked at his finger and twisted around the gold band I'd bought for him, the one with the little row of diamonds, nothing too flashy. It was too big for its intended finger, so he wore it on the middle finger of his left hand. I had a matching band on the appropriate finger. "Ask him," he said, indicating me with a nod of the head. "I told him any time he wants." 

I don't know why I didn't want to talk about it, other than that the whole thing seemed unnecessary. I remembered the day where, as far as I was concerned, we were married. We'd had a huge fight, big one that ended up with me walking out on Fox. I'd spent a whole night alone, searching my soul, and coming to the conclusion that I was surely and truly mated to this man forever. We didn't need a fuss to prove it. That'd been two years ago. It'd been good enough all this time without a fuss, hadn't it? 

* * *

The morning of the wedding, the sun rose to a clear, perfect blue sky. Billie Jo couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day. 

Miraculously, over the night, while we'd been gone at the party, Charlie hadn't managed to burn down the house or anything. Though the instant we got home, Janie had trounced off to bed with a murderous glare. Charlie was sleeping on the living room sofa, looking like a little angel, down to the slight blush on his pudgy cheeks. "What'd he do?" I asked. Ma was sitting up waiting too, and she laughed. Her only explanation was, "That child is the devil himself." 

This morning, as I was finishing getting dressed, adjusting the gray and white striped cravat so it was just right, Ma let herself into my old bedroom. She cleared her throat and I turned around from the mirror. "You clean up real nice, John Jay," she said. She cleaned up pretty nicely herself, having put herself into some floral print dress and a big hat that almost overwhelmed her small frame. She reached up on her tippy-toes to adjust the cravat and satisfied, she brushed her cheek against mine, an almost kiss. I don't think she wanted to get her lipstick on me. "Your father would have been proud of you. Don't you forget that. That man of yours is a good one, mind you don't let him slip away." 

I was about to protest, that there was no way I was going to let Fox go, but she said, "I've been watching him. He seems a little sad and envious about all this. Like the woman that's always the bridesmaid. I think it's time for you to put your money where your mouth is." 

"You think he wants all of this fuss? The limos. The formal wear?" I asked. I couldn't imagine Fox wanting any of the usual wedding fuss, even in the modified form it'd have to be. I hadn't wanted to go through it myself the first time I was married. Barb and I had a small ceremony, no one but family, and only my parents and immediate family at that. "The family? If they'd even come to such a thing." 

"John Jay Doggett, what makes you think that any of us would miss it?" she said. 

Elaine had been watching us through the doorway. She, too, was dressed in her floral best. "You try and throw it without us, and we'll all gatecrash. I know your cousins feel the same way. Any of 'em say a think against it, I'll step on their toes until they apologize. Now, get your butt moving. People are waiting." 

So, I got moving. Lainie threatens and you got moving. That was about the long and short of it. When I got out to our little rental, Fox was strapping the two little darlings into their car seats. Damn but didn't they all make a handsome picture. We'd dressed the boys in little, matching suits, in a gray that wasn't too somber, nor too light. I had the suspicion that Fox had had the suits made for the boys, that they weren't the usual off the rack thing. Say what you liked about Fox, he knew clothes. For himself, he always looked stunning in a tuxedo and he knew it. He wore it like he'd been born to it, so naturally that next to him, I might have felt like a gorilla stuffed into a suit, except there was something about the way he looked at me, like he was thinking the exact same thing about me as I was about him. And that gave me a big enough injection of confidence that I could stand up straight at his side and feel almost as handsome as he obviously thought I was. 

"All right, tough guy, nearly ready to go," he said as he straightened from buckling Charlie. "Can I just say that I'm one hell of a lucky guy to be on the arm of a looker like you?" 

Then he kissed me, briefly, but with such restrained passion that I had no doubt about how he felt. Not a one. It made me wish, for just a moment, that it was us that was going to be getting up in front of that crowd. Then good sense reasserted itself. 

The wedding itself was just exactly what I was expecting. The big music from the church organ. The swarms of big hats. The fields of floral dresses. The discrete sniffles and dabs of hankies as the bride and groom said their vows. 

Only two things surprised me. The second was the fact that at the end, at their recessional after the traditional music, something or another by Pachebel, the organist tacked on the obvious and unmistakable tune of the theme song to the Monty Python show. 

The first was how choked up I was about the time they were exchanging their vows. I'd been looking at the wedding couple, thinking back on to how important the expertise of them, and people like them had been to the struggle, and how much danger they'd willingly placed themselves in, and yet they'd survived to do this, and to continue loving and living, just like Fox and I had. Then I'd looked out to the congregation. I easily caught Fox's eyes, because he'd been staring at me in a way that caused my spine to about melt and my eyes to water for some unknown reason. It was another one of those moments. The ones that spring right out of nowhere and remind one that this was the real thing. The genuine item. The real McCoy. The kind of love they make movies out of. The kind of movies that only women go and see or drag their reluctant men to go see. Moments like these are like playing a friendly game of Sunday afternoon in the park football, then suddenly getting tackled by a three-hundred pound NFL linebacker. Luckily, only one tear escaped and I was able to keep my cool. 

Then it was over and we were heading out of the church to my Aunt Shirl's house, where they were having the reception. I declined to go with the wedding party in the limo. Instead, I got behind the wheel of our little rental with Fox at my side. Somehow, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else at the moment. 

Aunt Shirl's place was beautiful. She'd worked extra hard on the gardens, more so than normal, and so there were flowers everywhere. On top of that, they'd seemed to have put an arrangement of some kind on every flat surface they could find. The house itself must have just been painted, because it was sparkling. When we got out of the car, Fox looked at wonder at the big, pseudo plantation style mini-mansion and said, "Why, Rhett, I do believe we've gone back to Tara!" 

"Don't you dare let Aunt Shirl hear you say that," I said, thinking it would go straight to her head, because she did have the house designed to look just like the one in the damn movie. Actually, I thought the wedding thus far had been in surprisingly good taste. I'd feared bridesmaid dresses with skirts yards wide and the like. But the reception looked like it was shaping up to be something like what I'd been fearing. 

Swarms of relatives and friends soon covered the grounds and I was shooed into the receiving line, to meet and greet them all. This was just a small wedding, apparently, or so Janie had told me. That meant there were only about two-hundred and fifty here. They'd set up three big interconnected tents on the lawn, the center one mostly a big dance floor. There wasn't a band. There was a twenty piece swing orchestra. The wedding cake was an architectural excursion into the limits of what could be done with flour and sugar. I don't know how they did it, but the groom's cake was a complex confection obviously meant to represent DNA. The reception line lasted about twenty minutes after I'd gotten to the point where I could endure no more aunts and great aunts remembering how cute I'd been as little John Jay, some of them still tried to pinch my cheeks even. Meanwhile, Fox had been free to eat appetizers and get introduced round to the family. Carlton and his wife had attached themselves to Fox and were making the introductions. Maybe it was just the moral authority that Carlton and Sharon seemed to exude, or maybe it was Fox's goofy natural charm, but every time I looked, instead of the cold shoulder, or righteous anger as the person understood how Fox fit into the whole scheme of things, he was given a welcome. Of varying warmths, it was true. But no one was ever less than completely cordial to him. 

When the reception line was over, and I could make my way to his side, Fox said, "Thankfully, I appear to be the only Martin in the family. Jonathan was right. There are a lot of Johns in your family, John Jay. John Adam. John Edward. John Nelson. John Wallace. John Joseph. Johnny. Jack. Jackie. Johnny Ray. JD. JC. JB and JJ. And those are just the ones I remember. I think my head's going to spin." 

"You'll get used to it eventually," I said sympathetically. I'd had all my life to number as just another John among the multitude. I looked over at his partially full plate of appetizers hungrily. "Whatcha got there?" 

I grabbed one before he could answer, a little pastry thing that looked like it had ham and cheese in it. "Hey!" he said, but he was smiling. "There's plenty. Go get your own." 

There was plenty. Not just of food, but drink, and good music, and people I hadn't seen for years, not since Luke's funeral, coming up to me and hugging me, kissing me and generally being glad to see me. I was probably told a hundred times that night not to be such a stranger. Most everyone took to Fox too, and the boys, when they were underfoot. Charlie had found a couple of partners in crime and they amused themselves by staging raids on the food tables. The older kids more or less kept the chaos to a reasonable level, and if they didn't, the adults were all indulgent and smiled at the antics. 

At some point while they were loading up the dessert table and the band was keying up from background to swinging dance music, Fox turned to me and said, "Why do I feel like I've fallen into 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding, southern style?'" 

"Dunno," I said and had another sip on my beer. Fox was going to be the designated driver, so I could afford to indulge a little. "I never saw the movie. Don't tell me you saw it." 

"Yeah. And I liked it," he admitted sheepishly. Then added, with a grin that made me want to kiss him, "Blame Scully." 

I danced like I hadn't for years. With my sisters. With my sisters in law. With nieces. With cousins. With my Ma. That was kind of sweet and bittersweet in its own way. She still missed my Dad, but you could only tell that at times like this. "He could foxtrot like no one else I've ever met," she said when I released her from a foxtrot that had been barely passable at best. "You remind me of him so much, John Jay. You're a good man, just like he was. And a stubborn one." 

Suddenly, I was confronted with Fox. I guess I'd ignored him for too long. Maybe I'd had a little too much to drink, but I only protested a little when he took me into his arms and tried to lead me out onto the dance floor. 

"Hush, John Jay," he said. 

"Don't you start it, too," I threatened. "I can't dance with you. Not here. Sorry, buddy boy." 

"You can," he said, confidently. "And you will. John, there's not a person here that doesn't know by now what we are. And more than half of them are too drunk to care." 

And so I let him take me out on to the dance floor. The orchestra started up something sentimental, but perky, from the forties. "I double dare you to fall in love with me, I double dare you," the woman in front of the orchestra sang. 

And Fox's hands on me were warm and strong. His steps were sure, and under his tuxedo, I could feel his firm muscle rippling as we moved together. I'd thought for sure that we'd struggle with who was in the lead, but I found myself following him as naturally as walking. It was another moment of epiphany, another realization that he and I were meant to be. It was a realization that I'd been putting off all weekend- that I wanted more than anything to do this again, to have some good excuse to dance with him, and to have people look on and do nothing more than look approvingly at our love. That I wanted fuss and romance and cake. And dancing. 

"So," I said, as soon as the music was over and we were walking off the floor. "When we gonna get hitched? You want me to get the orchestra's card? I'm thinking we might as well starting planning now." 

Fox swallowed, "You want a twenty piece orchestra?" 

"Well, if we can bribe them to travel as far as DC," I said. "If not, definitely good, live music of some kind. I want dancing." 

"Okay. Dancing. We can do dancing," he said, sitting down. He was looking at me like I'd just grown an extra head. And an alien one with the big black eyes at that. "What else are you going to insist on?" 

"How do you feel about white tie?" 

"How big a do are you thinking here?" Fox asked. "Not that it's a problem. We've got enough money to do anything, include fly your family to Tahiti if we want." 

"Well, I was thinking, you know, with family, then people you and I know from work, and Walt, and the Scullys and so on, we're talking two hundred, minimum." 

"Uh-huh," he said, looking around him at the big to-do we were in the midst of, maybe wondering if he could put up with being smack in the middle of one of these. Right in the center. Being the one represented by the little tuxedoed figure on top of a big cake. Wondering maybe if all his prodding had created a monster. 

"I could care less about flowers," I added. "We could probably get the caterer to just put bunches of potted plants around." 

"Caterer?" 

"Of course. You can't have two-hundred fifty, three hundred people without a caterer. No limos though. But I like the idea of renting out a gym for the bachelor party. I'd like to see a rematch with you and Jonathan. See you wipe the court with him." 

Fox recovered his cool again. He grinned. "Whatever you want, John Jay. Nothing's too good for you. We'll talk details in the morning. Want to dance again?" 

"Oh, yeah," I said. "You bet I do."  
  

If you enjoyed this story, please send feedback to Rose Campion


End file.
